Trail of Lightning

Chapter 20

Shaking. My hands are shaking.

With adrenaline and rage. But fear, too. The suffocating fear that I am too late.

I slide to my knees at his side. Rest trembling fingers on his neck. His skin is painted red with blood, and my hand comes away sticky with it. But his pulse is strong.

“Kai.” I shake him gently. I dab at his face with the edge of my sleeve, trying to clear away the bloody mess around his nose and mouth in order to ease his breathing. He’s got something stuck in his mouth, and I ease his lips apart to remove his tie. Silvery blue stripes. Longarm had stuffed it down his throat.

I shudder. I work to hold on to some of the clarity and fury of Living Arrow, but my clan power has fled.

“You’ve got to wake up, Kai. We’ve got to move.” I shake him again, this time harder. He makes a sound. Heaves and coughs as he pulls air into his deprived lungs, and then instinctively tries to curl his knees up to his body, huddling into himself.

“No, no.” I pull at his shoulders, try to straighten him out. He’s too weak to fight me. I use the tip of my knife to break open the handcuffs and try to lift him by his arms. But he’s dead weight, and the loss of adrenaline has left me without the strength I need to move him. I freeze, sure I hear footsteps. Nothing. But I know it’s only a matter of time before someone finds us.

Bile rises in my throat and panic threatens to crest over and drown me. I force it down. Focus on the here and now.

I need to move Kai. Get us both out of sight before more Law Dogs come to see why Longarm hasn’t come back. Longarm. I spare a glance over my shoulder. What’s left of the Law Dog lies crumpled in a heap a few feet away, his face little more than raw meat.

I expect to feel some emotion at seeing him like that, seeing what I’ve done, but I don’t expect to feel satisfaction. Longarm’s words from yesterday fill my ears. Maybe you shouldn’t be hunting monsters. Maybe someone should be hunting you.

“Mags?” Kai’s eyes are open, bare slits.

I swallow, school the grin of relief trying to break across my face. “Can you move?” I ask him.

He nods, small and weak, but it’s a nod. Together we get him to his feet.

“We’ve got to get back to the truck,” I say. “You need a doctor, and we need to get as far away from here as possible.”

He makes a grunting sound that I take for a “yes.”

“If I can get you out of town, I know a place we can lay low for a while. Get you looked at. Figure out what happened to Tah, if he’s okay. But we—” I stop. Kai’s looking behind me. I know what he sees. I wait for him to recoil in horror. To demand to know how I could have done such a thing. To look at me and see the monster.

His eyes are wide, his face ghost-pale and blood-smeared. He swallows big. “Go,” he says, gingerly lifting his arm so I can slip under to hold him up.

We make it ten feet before he turns his head and vomits. I hold him while he heaves, again and again, until his stomach is empty and he’s reduced to a wet painful panting. I wait as long as I think is safe, conscious that every second we stand here is another second we’re exposed.

“We’ve got to move, Kai.”

He nods again and immediately shudders. “My head,” he slurs, his tongue thick and clumsy.

“You probably have a concussion,” I say, pushing him forward on shuffling feet. “Nausea is common, dizziness, memory loss.” I tick off the symptoms. “Totally normal.”

“Not the dead guy’s face making me sick?” he says, laughing weakly. A laugh that turns into a harsh cough and ends in a gagging noise. He works to catch his breath.

I grin, irrationally grateful for his morbid joke. “Just keep your feet moving, okay?”

We start up our awkward shuffling again. I catch a glimpse of my truck parked on the side of the road just two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards that stretch before us like two thousand.

I’ve opened the passenger’s side door and am helping Kai in when I hear the first shouts. Every muscle twitches, wanting me to look up, to confirm that they’ve found Longarm’s body and that they have noticed us. But I keep my head down and hurry over to slide into the driver’s side, mindful of not drawing attention.

I start up the engine and pull onto the road. Safely behind the wheel and moving, I allow myself to glance back at the scene we left only minutes ago. I can make out figures in khaki uniforms. There is noise and movement and a sense of alarm as they hover over Longarm’s body. I don’t allow myself to rubberneck, but instead face forward and try to blend in with the traffic on the road. I turn onto Highway 264 and drive past the northbound turn that goes back to Crystal, instead heading east into the Checkerboard Zone, the one place in Dinétah where Law Dogs don’t have any jurisdiction.

Kai’s slumped against the door. His eyes are shut, mouth slack, breathing shallow. I shake him to wake him up. “No sleeping with a head injury,” I warn him.

He cracks one eye open. The skin around it is already turning black and purple, the swelling forcing it closed. “I didn’t know you cared, Mags,” he whispers through dry, bloodstained lips.

“I don’t.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

I turn away from him to watch the road.

We’re silent as we speed out of town and into the open desert. The red rock cliffs of Tse Bonito give way to low rolling hills, wide expanses of drought-brown earth and dry scrub. The sky is clear, a sacrilege of spotless brilliant blue, all signs of fire and smoke lost as the miles pile up behind us. After a while Kai speaks again, his voice thick and wheezing like he’s having trouble breathing. “Where are you taking me?”

“Woman I know owns a place out in the Checkerboard Zone. Land out there is still broken up from the Allotment Period—one acre’s Navajo land, the next bilagáana land, and she’s on the kind of land where CWAG and Navajo cops aren’t welcome. More importantly, her place is behind twenty feet of razor wire and half a dozen AR-15s. Assuming she lets us in, it’ll give us a safe place to figure out what to do.”

“Assuming?”

“Grace Goodacre can be hard to read. We’re not exactly friends, but she’s known as a safe place when you’re running from the law. If there’s anybody she hates in this world, it’s the Law Dogs.”

I look over at Kai. He’s watching my fingers drum nervously on the steering wheel. I still my hands. “I’m bringing some serious heat her way,” I say by way of explanation. “I just hope she’s feeling generous today.”

Kai nestles down in his corner between the seat and the door. He closes his eyes again, wincing as spasms of pain cross his face. “You’ll convince her,” he says. “I have total faith in you.”

I bite my lip and give the truck more gas, not nearly as confident in our welcome. I check the rearview mirror for the third or fourth time in the last minute. It’s still clear. No one is chasing us. But I can’t relax until we’re inside somewhere safe and hidden and Kai has someone to look at his injuries. Then I’ll let myself think about what to do next. About Longarm. About Tah.

“He’s dead, Maggie.”

Kai’s eyes are open and fixed on me. I try to swallow, but something is stuck in my throat. He sags a little and turns away to gaze out the window to the distance beyond us.

“You don’t know that.”

“Longarm said he saw his body.”

“Longarm’s a fucking liar.”

“Why would he lie? I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you loved him like family.”

“No.”

“I—”

“There’s Grace’s place,” I say, cutting him off. I point with my lips to the structure coming up on our left.

There, in a clearing off the side of the highway and otherwise in the middle of nowhere, sheltered behind metal fencing three times as tall as the tallest man in Dinétah and tipped with circles of razor wire, sits Grace’s All-American. The All-American is a bar. More of an oversize shack, really, it is approximately eight hundred feet across and half as deep, sheeted in gray paneling meant to resemble wood but mostly just looking like the aluminum siding that it is. A vintage neon sign blinks OPEN or CLOSED depending on the time of day and the juice in the generator, and plastic banners older than the Big Water declare the All-American THE HOME OF THE KING OF BEERS. Of course, Grace doesn’t serve Budweiser anymore since St. Louis drowned along with the rest of the Midwest, but the sign remains, optimistic. Everything else about the place screams “Abandon All Hope!” There’s only one way in and one way out through those metal gates, and that’s through the heavily armed guard in the bulletproof gatehouse.

I slow the truck, pulling up to the entrance. I roll down the window and come to a stop.

A black kid, no more than fourteen, steps out of the gatehouse. He’s decked out in full-on military fatigues and combat boots, and he points an automatic rifle at me. He has light brown skin and an incongruous mass of red kinky hair and bright freckles, and his hands are more like puppy paws around that gun, but I know better than to underestimate him.

“You look like your mom,” I say, greeting him.

“Bar doesn’t open until sundown,” he says, his voice unimpressed.

“I’m not here to drink. I’m here to see your mom.”

He frowns. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Maggie Hoskie. She knows me.”

The kid looks me over. I can see his keen eyes evaluating me, taking in the shotgun on the back rack, the blood smeared across my face and hands, and finally resting on Kai, who has closed his eyes and seems to be sleeping again. “What the hell happened to him?” he asks. “He’s not dead, is he? He looks like shit.”

“He’s not dead. Law Dogs got him.”

Something in the kid’s shoulders relaxes, and he grins, looking like the teenager he is. “Fucking Law Dogs,” he says, mustering all the outrage of someone who’s never had to deal with them up close.

“Yeah,” I agree. “You think we can get in and see Grace now?”

He has an old-fashioned walkie-talkie strapped to his belt, and he pulls it out and turns away from me to talk to whoever is on the other end. With his back to me, K’aahanáanii whispers to me that it would be simple to pull the Glock I still have tucked in my pocket and put a bullet through the back of his skull. Of course, the other guards would come running, and I know whoever is dumb enough to kill one of Grace’s sons won’t get far. But Freckles would still be dead.

I shake off the thought, force myself to take a few breaths to tamp down K’aahanáanii.

He turns around, smiling, and waves me through. “Mom’s behind the bar!” he shouts as I pull through the gates. “She said park around back. Someone will show you where.”

I drive through the dusty parking lot to pull around to the back of the bar. To the right is an impeccably clean double-wide trailer, painted white with flower boxes in the windows and framed by a wide welcoming porch. Two people are sitting on rocking chairs in front of the trailer, rifles held loosely in their laps. They stand up and come down the steps toward us. They are twins, a man and a woman, both looking like variations of the kid at the front gate, with the same light brown freckled skin and red curly hair. The woman motions me over to a bank of garages across from the house, while the man hurries forward to open one of half a dozen garage doors. I pull the truck in, careful not to scratch the paint. Before I even get the engine off, the man opens the passenger’s side door and scoops Kai up, lifting him out of the truck like he weighs nothing. He hustles out of the garage and takes Kai back to the trailer. Just like that.

Surprised, I jump out to follow, but the woman blocks me with a muscled arm.

“Where is he taking him?” I ask, alarmed.

“We’ll take care of him. Mom wants to see you.”

I think about breaking past her and following Kai. The man has already reached the porch and is shouldering the front door of the trailer open. I watch as they disappear inside.

“I should be with him,” I protest.

She shakes her head, implacable. “Mom first.”

She’s right. I’m a guest, and if the host is asking for me, I have to go. I gesture for her to lead the way, and after she pulls the garage door closed to conceal my truck, we head to the back door of the All-American bar.

The door swings open to the perpetual twilight of all good dive bars. Straight ahead lies a wooden dance floor, and to the left, perched on a rectangle of wall-to-wall orange carpet that has seen better days, is a smattering of low round wagon-wheel tables and squat matching chairs. A long wooden bar stretches the length of the front wall, a line of barstools bellied up and waiting for customers.

Grace Goodacre is behind the bar, as she always seems to be. She’s a small woman with a nut-brown face dotted with sunspots and freckles, and a shock of white wavy hair she wears dreadlocked and tied back in a thick braid. Her mouth is smiling, warm with welcome, but her dark eyes are wary. She looks briefly toward my escort, and her daughter falls back to guard the door, rifle held ready.

Grace motions me forward, and I cross the empty dance floor to take a seat on one of the lonely barstools. She pulls me a beer from her tap and sets it in front of me.

“Don’t really drink beer,” I say.

She knocks a knuckle against the bar. “You’ll drink what I say you drink. I remember the last time you were here. Crying in your whiskey about that man of yours. Clarissa had to drag you out and let you sleep it off in your truck. From now on, you drink beer.”

I flush, hot. Look over my shoulder at her daughter, who must be the Clarissa in question. “Don’t really remember that, Grace.”

“Well, I remember it. And that’s all that matters.”

We stare at each other, the tension thick between us. I am at her mercy and I don’t like it. It makes my jaw ache. But I came to her. I need her help. And she knows it.

So I take a sip of beer. My eyes close, almost involuntarily, as the alcohol washes over me. The beer is cool and crisp and I didn’t realize how thirsty I was. I take a few long swallows before I set the glass down.

Grace watches me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“It’s good,” I admit.

She sniffs, a kind of I-told-you-so. She’s won the first round, established who’s in charge, and now she busies herself wiping glasses like we’re old friends. “So what brings you to my door, Maggie Hoskie?”

“Might need a place to sit tight for a while. Expecting some heat from CWAG to be coming my way.”

She eyes the blood smeared across my chest, on my hands and face. “You payin’?”

“Don’t have much on me right now. This situation is kind of . . . unexpected.”

Her lips twist in disappointment. She raises a hand and Clarissa slides off her stool and out the back door. Minutes later she’s back, bearing the contents of my truck. She spreads it out on the bar and Grace begins sorting through my stuff, small hands quick and efficient. Her eyes rest on my shotgun, and I frown.

“You can’t have my shotgun,” I say.

She shrugs. “What do I need with your pump-action piece of shit when I’ve got an arsenal of AR-15s?” she asks.

“My point entirely,” I agree.

She cracks a smile. “Take your damn gun, Maggie,” she says, and I slide over to retrieve my shotgun before she can change her mind.

“It’s not a piece of shit, by the way,” I say. “This is a custom grip I had made to fit my hand. It cost me two days of labor bailing alfalfa. Worth every minute. Hey, you can’t have my jacket, either.”

She pushes the leather jacket my way, not even bothering to look up. “This coffee?” she asks, tapping the metal canister that holds the precious grounds.

I wave it away. “Take it.” Everyone wants that damn coffee. If it buys me some goodwill from Grace, it’ll be worth its weight in gold.

“You really don’t have anything, do you? Doesn’t bounty hunting pay any better than this?”

I think of the rug I left on the floor of the Lukachukai Chapter House. “Like I said, situation’s unexpected.”

Sharp fingernails drum the bar. “The coffee’s just a start,” she says. “So don’t give me any lip about taking it. It’s payment, fair and square.”

“Okay.”

“And you’ll owe me a favor sometime. Not now. I can tell you’re ass-deep in something else I want no part of, but if you make it out in one piece, you swing back by and we’ll talk.”

“Okay.”

She sweeps her hand across the bar, taking in the rejected goods—a couple days’ worth of provisions, my shotgun shells, and Coyote’s bag. She doesn’t even ask about the bag. I have a feeling it doesn’t look the same to her as it does to me. “Get this crap out of here,” she tells her daughter, who rushes over to comply.

“Careful with my crap,” I tell her as she carries it out, presumably back to my truck.

I turn to find Grace watching me, eyes appraising. “What’s that in your pocket?”

I pull out the Glock and set in on the bar.

“Safety on?”

“Glocks don’t have a safety. Just don’t pull the trigger. Safe enough.”

She rolls her eyes. “Stupid. Never did like automatic handguns. Prefer a revolver any day.” She points with the hand that holds her towel. “That have something to do with why you’re here?”

“You could say that.”

“Then I definitely don’t want it.” Back in my pocket it goes.

“Now tell me about the man with you.”

“Law Dog got to him.”

“Same Law Dog that ended up on the business end of that gun?”

“It was Longarm.”

Grace stares at me. I stare back. The silence stretches until she gives a little shudder and turns away first.

“You want us to leave, Grace?” I ask, my voice quiet. If she does, I don’t know where we’ll go, but I don’t stay where I’m not wanted. Maybe she will take Kai at least. If he’s somewhere safe, I can handle whatever comes next.

Grace sighs. “No, I don’t want you to leave,” she says. “But next time don’t sit at my bar drinking a beer like your worst worry is a friend who lost a scuffle. Didn’t your mother teach you that you don’t wait to tell people bad news?” She barks a laugh. “It’s my own fault for forgetting who I’m talking to,” she admits. She mutters a curse word and my name and something else I can’t quite follow, but it’s pretty clear whatever she said is no compliment.

With a wry grin she reaches under the bar and produces a bottle of amber liquid. She pulls down two short glasses from the shelf behind her and pours us each a shot of whiskey. She slides mine over. Grateful, I push the beer to the side and take a sip of the whiskey, letting it burn down my throat. She downs her shot in one quick swallow.

She glares at me, finger pointing. “You got twenty-four hours, and then you’re gone. Not a minute more, no matter what kind of payment you come up with. Now go check on that fella of yours. You ain’t got a lick of sense when it comes to picking men, Maggie Hoskie. At least teach this one how to fight.”

I nod and quickly down the rest of my drink. I don’t bother to explain that Kai isn’t my fella. Clarissa is back, and I follow her out to the trailer. I look back to see Grace pouring herself another shot before the door swings shut in my face.